The Return Of The Literate Cockroach

Archy And His Racy Feline Friend Mehitabel See The Light Of Another Day, Thanks To The Discovery Of Some Uncollected Tales By Don Marquis

April 08, 1996|By Connie Lauerman, Tribune Staff Writer.

In 1916, when New York Sun writer Don Marquis had trouble coming up with material for his newspaper column, he created a character to help him out, a philosophical cockroach named Archy who would voice his opinions on the issues of the day.

Archy--or, more accurately, archy--would leave messages in Marquis' typewriter overnight. The insect, who supposedly typed by leaping from key to key, couldn't press down the shift key, so his free verse was neither capitalized nor punctuated. In his first missive he wrote that "expression is the need of my soul."

FOR THE RECORD - Additional material published May 2, 1996:Corrections and clarificationsAn April 8 Tempo story stated that newspaper columnist Don Marquis, creator of the characters Archy and Mehitabel, was born in New York. He was born in Walnut, Ill. The Tribune regrets the error.

For years Archy and his sidekick, Mehitabel (pronounced ma-HIT-a-bel), a jaunty alley cat, entertained fans with irreverent and poetic observations about life, politics and human pretensions.

A poet, playwright, novelist, essayist and screenwriter, Marquis, who died in 1937, is best remembered for these seemingly offhand literary creations, two of the most common urban inhabitants around. The pair's antics were even fashioned into a Broadway musical in 1957 called "Shinbone Alley" with Eartha Kitt playing Mehitabel.

Now "archyology: the long lost tales of archy and mehitabel" (University Press of New England) has been published, the first new collection of Archy and Mehitabel stories in decades.

In an introduction to a 1950 reprint edition of Marquis' verse, "the lives and times of archy and mehitabel," essayist E.B. White wrote: "In one sense Archy and his racy pal Mehitabel are timeless. In another sense they belong rather intimately to an era--an era in American letters when this century was in its teens and its early twenties, an era before the newspaper column had degenerated.

"In 1916 to hold a job on a daily newspaper, a columnist was expected to be something of a scholar and a poet. Nowadays, to get a columning job, a man need only have the soul of a Peep Tom or third-rate prophet. There are plenty of loud clowns and bad poets at work on papers today, but there are not many columnists adding to belles lettres and certainly there is no Don Marquis at work on any big daily, or if there is, I haven't encountered his stuff."

Marquis' creations might have continued to exist strictly on library shelves were it not for the devotion of Jeff Adams, a California business consultant and yet-to-be-published novelist who discovered Archy and Mehitabel in the late 1960s as a college student and habitue of second-hand bookstores.

Adams chanced upon a copy of same collection that White wrote the introduction for and "fell in love with it in about two minutes." He would dip into it at night after he finished studying.

"It was captivating," he says. "It was easy stuff to read. There was no challenge, other than trying to figure out the punctuation, which was fun. It seems obscure at first but it really isn't. And you can always go back to the material and find other things like word play."

In the 1970s Adams began collecting books. "When I figured out I would end up with a million books, I thought I might as well try to . . . concentrate on (one) author and try to put together the best collection I could. That would give some focus and purpose to my habit.

"I chose Marquis (pronounced MAR-kwis) because I remembered Archy and Mehitabel and also because he was somewhat available in terms of first editions and so forth--and affordable. I didn't have a whole lot of money. If it was a choice between Don Marquis and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who I also enjoyed reading a lot, it was either a library of Don Marquis or about two books of F. Scott Fitzgerald."

Archy, Mehitabel hit the road

Adams' devotion led to the publication this month of "archyology," in which Archy and Mehitabel sail to Paris to visit the insects of Europe, where Mehitabel assists in her own abduction and Archy is handicapped by the language barrier. There also is a sequence about georgie the college centipede who lives at Vassar where "they haven t any/passions or even/any feelings except/stark terror/at the sight of/my pal/christabel the rat/i verily believe she/has more power and/prestige with the college/girls than the president/himself. . ."

Marquis was born in New York but educated at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. He began his newspaper career as a reporter at the Atlanta Journal, and he also was associate editor of Uncle Remus's Magazine, established by Joel Chandler Harris in 1907. In 1912 Marquis left Atlanta for New York, where he became one of the best-known literary journalists. He wrote a column called "The Sun Dial" for the New York Sun and, later, another called "The Lantern" for the Herald Tribune. Archy and Mehitabel first appeared in "The Sun Dial" in March 1916.

Adams told book dealers and others in the literary world that he was very interested in collecting books by Don Marquis and "became lucky very fast in terms of finding things."